As background, many vehicles have integrated software to provide certain functionality. Before the vehicle is sold to a consumer, the software is validated to ensure that the software performs the functionality without an undesirable level of errors. The software validation can include testing the software with a number of test cases in a controlled environment that is intended to simulate the use of the vehicle. Current test case generation tools utilize two main classes of methods for test case generation to comply with the international standards organization (ISO) standards/recommendations.
The first class can be described as a formal method that utilizes mathematics to prove correctness of software. However this first class has many limitations due to the fact that non-linear mathematics, look-up tables, state-space explosion, computational limitations, and the like occur in complex software. Accordingly, this first class is often limited to smaller sized, less complicated software. The second class can be described as random test case generation that provides modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) through targeted random test cases. However, random test case generation is likely to provide an insufficient variety of test cases to achieve an acceptable MC/DC for complex or large software.